A weblog on nature and place, the design arts, critters, and baseball...

Who We Are

Numenius is a geographer by training and temperament. He is a Bay Area native, and grew up roaming the East Bay hills. Pica takes her cue from Pica nuttalli, the endemic magpie of central California, chatty and alighting on gleaming things. Pica has another blog, Bird by Bird, in which she records her sketches of birds.

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19 January 14

The New OpenStreetMapper

I didn’t expect I’d launch into 2014 with a whole new hobby. Towards the end of winter break, I bought an 7” Android tablet, the Google Nexus 7. I was not entirely sure what I would do with it, but since it has a GPS chip, it didn’t take long for me to start exploring mapping applications for it. This led inevitably to OpenStreetMap.

OpenStreetMap is a project that has been around almost 10 years; essentially it is the equivalent of WIkipedia for worldwide street mapping. In other words, it is a massive crowdsourcing project to build a quite detailed map database for the world that’s freely available as open data. (There’s an excellent recent blog post entitled simply Why the world needs OpenStreetMap.) I’ve known about the project for a long time (in fact its founder once gave a talk about it to our lab group), but had never signed up to contribute data. Buying the tablet closed a loop for me, since I could now go on walks, pull out my tablet, and check a recent copy of the map to see if there were unmapped details I should record.

What does one map? Anything and everything. Looking at the map, I quickly found that neither the California Raptor Center nor the network of trails on the other side of the creek from our house were in there, so I set about mapping them. And now these features are in OpenStreetMap! The figure show the trails I’ve added; they’re the tracks marked in dashed red lines just north of the creek.

It’s amazing amounts of fun. It helps that I’m a map geek already, but walking, exploring, and maps, what could be better?

Good work! I really wish this had existed 10 years ago, to help me know which dirt tracks would connect me back to campus fastest while birding the Putah Creek trails! I will have to see how Athens, GA shapes up on OpenStreetMap.